The present invention relates to safety and warning systems and methods for wheeled ground vehicles such as automobiles, trucks, and the like.
Statistics indicate that the side impact or “T-bone” type of collision is responsible for a substantial proportion of the serious injuries and fatalities sustained each year in traffic accidents. In a common scenario, vehicle A moves from a dead stop from a side street onto an intersecting roadway and is struck in the side by vehicle B traveling along the intersecting roadway. A common cause of such side impact collisions is simply that driver A misjudges the speed of the oncoming vehicle B, or does not see vehicle B at all. Such incidents are becoming more common as the driving population ages. Once driver A begins to enter the intersection, it is often too late for him or her to do much to avoid being struck by vehicle B because vehicle A is usually traveling at a low speed and hence has little maneuverability. Thus, if driver B is slow to see or realize that vehicle A is beginning to move into the intersection, there may be little that either driver can do to avoid a collision.
In terms of safety engineering, most efforts have tended to focus on providing protective systems such as steel beams in the doors and/or side air bags in an effort to reduce the severity of the trauma sustained by the occupants of the vehicle in a side impact crash. However, this is difficult at best because of the relatively small distance between the outer surface of the vehicle side and the occupant.